What exactly is the barrier between just having two way satellite communications on every plane for the purposes of tracking and reporting its location?
I used to build devices for aerospace. These were groundside, never ever airside. The systems (and thus costs) for building these devices were extensive and complex. Every item, every component, every screw, every washer, all the chemicals (paint, conformal coating, etc) could be traced from a finished unit (via its serial number) back through the manufacturing chain. When my company moved from a paperworks systems (suprisingly good) to computers (unsurprisingly flawed) they kept the paperwork system for these products because it was so important to never fail audit.
It's easy to look at consumer grade off the shelf systems and think that the cost would be maybe four or five times higher, but I think the cost would be significantly greater.
Add to that the difficulty of getting any component on a circuit diagram changed and the need to continue producing these units for every aircraft for many years and there's additional complication there.
Such a system also wouldn't be immune to being disabled as the current tracking systems are. People need to learn to live with uncertainty instead of trying to remove it.
- The iridium satellite network, which provides phone service, also provides a Short Burst Data service, which I suspect could be used for this purpose.
- The Argo network tracks thousands of ocean drifters (http://www.argos-system.org/?nocache=0.9626778103411198). Some of those drifters are using the Iridium network now.
Iridium only has ~8Mhz of bandwidth, that is fine for a sensor platform that probably only transmits a couple of times a day, but could quickly run into trouble with constant positional updates from thousands of planes (especially with streaming of cockpit data recorders, as has been argued for as well). And the saturation of the Iridium network is not something that can be controlled without extensive re-engineering to enable QOS.
I don’t think the fixed cost should be as high as you suggest because the functionality would (arguably) not be safety-critical, in contrast to your examples, and therefore subject to weaker regulations.
Emergency geolocation doesn’t affect flight safety, only rescue operations. What happens if the new GPS location functionality fails? The only deleterious consequence is if the other locations systems fail (ELT) and the error causes, in the event that saving passengers is possible, for SAR to look in the wrong place when they otherwise would have looked in the correct one.
I am not sure of that. Consider the implications of an electrical fire. If the system can be turned off it wouldn't have helped here. If it couldn't be turned on then you have electrical fires killing people.
I am not sure the problem of this incident can be fixed by looking at the plane. I think we need to know more about who, why, and how first.
You need to read my comment in context of the linked blog post I was responding to which addressed only the cost of adding additional emergency geolocation and the reason why it was expensive.
I suggest that it shouldn't actually be expensive because the safety impact is negligible.